CHAPTER XLIII.
Southern Feeling.—Memorial Services at Jefferson, Kentucky.—Extracts from Address by Henry Watterson.—Senator Bayard.—Ex-Speaker Randall.—Senator Hill.—Extracts from some of the Southern Journals.
At the United States military post at Jefferson, Kentucky, memorial services were held in the presence of fifteen thousand people.
Henry Watterson, the Democratic ex-Congressman, gave an eloquent address, from which we quote the following:—
"I knew him well, and know now that I loved him. He was a man of ample soul, with the strength of a giant, the courage of a lion, and the heart of a dove. There never lived a man who yearned for the approval of his fellow-men, who felt their anger more. There never lived a man who struggled harder to realize Paul's idea, and to be all things to all men. Did ever the character sketched by Paul find a nobler example, for he was blameless, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, apt to teach, not given to filthy lucre. No one without the little family circle of relatives and friends in which he lived will ever know how a certain dismal, though in truth trivial, episode in his career cut him to the soul. Born a poor man's son, to live and die a poor man, with opportunities unbounded for public pillage, with licensed robbery going on all around him, and he pinched for the bare means to maintain himself, his wife and his little ones with decency and comfort, to be held up to the scorn of men as one not honest! He is gone now, and before he went he had outlived the wounds which party friends alike with party foes had sought to put upon his honor and manhood, and maybe to-day somewhere among the stars he looks down upon the world and sees at last how selfish and unreal were the assaults of those in whose way he stood. It is a pleasure to me to reflect amid these gloomy scenes that some friendly words of mine gratified him at a moment when he suffered most. Not in the last campaign, for it would have been a crime in me to have hesitated then, but away back when no vision of the presidency had crossed the disc of his ambition, and when the cruelest blows were struck from behind. It is also a pleasure for me to remember the last time I saw him. It was during an all-night session of the House, when in company with Joseph Hawley of Connecticut, Randall Gibson of Louisiana, and Randolph Tucker, we took possession of the committee rooms of Proctor Knott, who joined us later, and turned all bickerings and jars into happy forgetfulness of section and party. I do well remember how buoyant he was that night in spirit and how robust in thought, full of suggestion, and in repartee, unaffected and genial ever; how delighted to lay aside the statesman and the partisan and be a boy again, and how loth he was, with the rest, to recross the narrow confines which separate the real and ideal, and to descend into the hot abyss below. I could not have gone thence to blacken that man's character any more than to do another deed of shame; and Republican though he was, and party chief, he had no truer friends than the brilliant Virginian whom he loved like a brother, and the eminent Louisianian whose counsels he habitually sought. I refer to an incident unimportant in itself to illustrate a character which unfolded to the knowledge of the world through affliction, and whose death has awakened the love and admiration of mankind.
"All know that he was a man of spotless integrity who might have been rich by a single deflection, but who died poor, who broadened and rose in height with each rise in fortune, who was not less a scholar because he had wanted early advantages, and who, not yet fifty, leaves as a priceless heritage to his countrymen the example of how God-given virtues of the head and heart may be employed to the glory of God and the uses of men, by one who makes all things subordinate to the development of the good within him. On all these points we think together; there are not two opinions. We stand upon common ground; we shall separate and go hence, and each shall take his way. Interests shall clash, beliefs shall jar, party spirit shall lift its horned head and interpose to chill and cloud our better natures. That is but a condition of our being. We are mortal and we live in a free land. Out of discussion and dissension ends are shapened; we rough-hewing in spite of us. However, occasions come which remind us that we have a country and are countrymen; which tell us we are a people bound together by many kindred ties. No matter for our quarrels, they will pass away. No matter for our mistakes, they shall be mended. But yesterday we were at war one with the other. The war is over. But yesterday we were arrayed in the anger of party conflict; behold how its passions sleep in the grave with Garfield. I am here to-day to talk to you of him, and through him and in his memory and honor to talk of our country. He was its chief magistrate, our President, representative of things common to us all; stricken down in the fulness of life and hope by wanton and aimless assassination. He fell like a martyr; he suffered like a hero; he died like a saint. Be his grave forever and aye a resting place for the people, and for the seeds that burst thereon to let the violets bring spring flowers of peace and love for all the people. Citizens, the flag which waves over us was his flag and it is our flag. Soldiers, standing beneath that flag and this armed fortress of the Republic, I salute your flag and his flag reverently. It is my flag. I thank God, and I shall teach my children to thank God, that it did not go down amid the fragments of a divided country, but that it floats to-day, though at half mast, as a symbol of union and liberty, assuring and reassuring us, that though the heart that conceived the words be cold, and the lips that uttered them be dumb, 'God reigns and the government at Washington still lives.'"
The tributes paid to the memory of Garfield by his political opponents show strikingly how widely he was honored and beloved by those who knew him as a friend as well as the leader of a party.
Senator Bayard always treated the President with affectionate respect, and mourns him deeply. Ex-Speaker Randall "knew him intimately and respected him greatly." Senator Hill is much affected by the death. "Poor Garfield," he says, "was a big-hearted and a big-brained man. I shall never forget the last time I saw him. He was so cheerful and apparently happy. I never saw him fuller of mental and physical vigor and of hope for the future than then. I want to always remember him as he appeared to me then—a perfect man."
The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, said: "The President is dead, and all the nations responding to that touch of sympathy which makes the whole world kin stand uncovered in the presence of a calamity; for tragedies, ever calamitous, are doubly so when they spring from murder and attach themselves to the head of the State, the symbol of power, the representative of the people and law. If ever mortal stood in these relations to his country and his time, this man did so. It was the universal sense that he did so which brought around his bedside his fellow citizens without distinction of political opinion, and caused women who had never seen him to pray for him, and little children, who conceived not the emergency nor the magnitude nor the contingencies hanging upon his life, to ask each day after his well-being, as if he were a father ill and dying in some far-off place. Perhaps, too, the flash of the assassin's pistol let in to many a heart a feeling of honest regret, before dormant and unconscious, that they had consented to see so good and so useful a man so pitilessly assailed in his private honor during periods of angry partisan contention, and a consequent wish, personally, to disavow this and to make a part of it at least up to him in his dire misfortune."
The Baltimore Sun (Independent), alluding to President Garfield's death, said: "Turning from the peculiarly tragic and distressing circumstances of the President's death, 'tis difficult to exaggerate the loss which the nation sustains in his death at this time. Although his Administration was in its infancy, President Garfield had already met the confidence of his country in the integrity of his purposes, the moderation, soundness and conservatism of his policy."